Goodbye Webcentre

Our WebCentre control panel has served us well for over 10 years, however, as we move into 2014 it has said its goodbyes.

The WebCentre was developed entirely in-house, based on PHP and using a distributed architecture it was ahead of its time when first launched.  It was first released in 2002, to replace our original solution which actually sent an email every time a user made a change, so we could manually update the config.

It was able to control web servers (both Linux and Windows), email servers, mysql servers, DNS servers, virus and spam filtering servers and, although never released, even had a VPS control system added to it.  It also handled the billing and domain name renewals.

However, as better and better commercial software has been released in recent years, which has become increasingly customisable to our specific needs, we made the decision to discontinue development of the WebCentre.  Being proprietary, there were no scripts available to move our users over to new systems, so other than a few scripts we wrote ourselves, this has primarily been a manual process – to help avoid errors and spread the migration over time.

The move away from the WebCentre has made all kinds of new and improved features available, though we continue to develop our own scripts and customisations to make sure we maintain the services we know our customers want.